Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
There is a lot of room to go down from here and probably some tuning on the route as well. My only practice really was what I got from writing the route. I found out shortly after finishing this that I wasn't the first person to do a run of this game, however I do believe I'm the first to incorporate a pretty major glitch that my route is pretty heavily centered around.
After passing through a screen transition, by opening the pause menu on what appears to be the earliest possible moment, it is possible to jump forward another screen when closing the menu. For now, I'm calling it Screen Transition Jumping (STJ). This is quite challenging (I'm not sure what framerate this game runs at, but based on feel, I wouldn't guess this to be any less than a 1/60th of a second window and possibly tighter than that, though maybe I'm just bad). I can use this to bypass terrain that would otherwise completely block my path (rivers, cliffs, etc.) and also to pass through locked doors in dungeons without a key. That being said, it does not appear to be an all-powerful technique and there are some major limitations from what I can tell.
1: It will only ever jump ahead in the direction you're traveling (going through a left transition always results in jumping out the right side of the next screen over.)
2: It does not seem possible to jump past a screen boundary where no transition exists. For instance, if one edge of the room is completely bordered, even if another room exists on the other side of said border, I cannot get through it.
3: The transitions must line up. This is a similar restriction to above, but because your position on a new screen corresponds to your position on the previous, you cannot jump unless the screen transitions are in line with each other. Not a big deal for most of the overworld, but can be quite restrictive in dungeons.
4: Transitions from the overworld into a sub-area (caves, dungeons) do not work for this trick. This means you can never STJ up past the first door of a dungeon.
5: I haven't been able to get consecutive jumps. There's a few places where being able to chain together 2 or more of these jumps would skip extra keys in a dungeon (key to enter pre-boss room and boss key in first half of tower)
6: Some room dimensions seem to not work. There were a few cases where it seemed that I should have been able to get an STJ, but it just didn't work despite bashing my head against it for almost an hour. I could be bad, but I doubt it would take me that long to get a single one considering how often I use the STJs in this run.
7: Perhaps the biggest restriction is that despite being able to get almost anywhere in the overworld immediately with this technique, most of the dungeons in the game are still closed until the prior dungeon is completed. The exceptions to this seem to follow a very classic assumption based check that we see in Ocarina of Time (specifically thinking to only needing shadow and spirit medallion for light arrows). The dungeons that are open all the time are Pink Castle (because it's the first one), Marine's Ship (normally the bridge to reach this section of the map is broken until completing the first 3 dungeons), and Shiori's Archive (there is a boulder blocking the usual route that only Gigi can break, but she takes her sweet time doing so until Nerissa is defeated).
With all this in mind, I can skip:
-A small key and the boss key in Pink Castle.
-2 small keys in Cemetery.
-Going around through the lower path to reach the desert (small skip)
-The left path in the first section of Desert Temple.
-Going to the disjointed sections of Desert Temple to open doors in the main branch (so she'll be standing on that button forever).
Completing Desert Temple (only need Gigi's Tail).
-The entirety of the mountains region and Crystal Cave (as a side effect, I can't get any weapon/item upgrades, making late-game bosses very difficult and many rooms are much harder without Jewel of Emotion from Crystal Cave).
-2 small keys in Marine's Ship.
-A small key in the Islands dungeon.
-Most of the Islands dungeon (can leave immediately after getting the Music Staff).
-Small keys and puzzles in Shiori's Archive.
-Torch puzzle at the start of Tower
-A small key and the boss key in Tower 1st half
-(I didn't do this one in the run because I didn't think of it until afterwards, but the Hakos Baelz boss fight can be skipped)
-Some small keys and a significant portion of the Tower 2nd half.
All splits have been inputted manually after the completion of the run (It's hard to play on keyboard and hit a split key while playing. Might tinker with learning to make an autosplitter, we'll see.)
As I mentioned at the start, I wasn't the first person to do a run and I think it would be cool to see some meta progression for this Zelda-like game.
You can find the game here: store.steampowered.com/app/4184020/An_Automatons_Journey
There is a lot of room to go down from here and probably some tuning on the route as well. My only practice really was what I got from writing the route. I found out shortly after finishing this that I wasn't the first person to do a run of this game, however I do believe I'm the first to incorporate a pretty major glitch that my route is pretty heavily centered around.
After passing through a screen transition, by opening the pause menu on what appears to be the earliest possible moment, it is possible to jump forward another screen when closing the menu. For now, I'm calling it Screen Transition Jumping (STJ). This is quite challenging (I'm not sure what framerate this game runs at, but based on feel, I wouldn't guess this to be any less than a 1/60th of a second window and possibly tighter than that, though maybe I'm just bad). I can use this to bypass terrain that would otherwise completely block my path (rivers, cliffs, etc.) and also to pass through locked doors in dungeons without a key. That being said, it does not appear to be an all-powerful technique and there are some major limitations from what I can tell.
1: It will only ever jump ahead in the direction you're traveling (going through a left transition always results in jumping out the right side of the next screen over.)
2: It does not seem possible to jump past a screen boundary where no transition exists. For instance, if one edge of the room is completely bordered, even if another room exists on the other side of said border, I cannot get through it.
3: The transitions must line up. This is a similar restriction to above, but because your position on a new screen corresponds to your position on the previous, you cannot jump unless the screen transitions are in line with each other. Not a big deal for most of the overworld, but can be quite restrictive in dungeons.
4: Transitions from the overworld into a sub-area (caves, dungeons) do not work for this trick. This means you can never STJ up past the first door of a dungeon.
5: I haven't been able to get consecutive jumps. There's a few places where being able to chain together 2 or more of these jumps would skip extra keys in a dungeon (key to enter pre-boss room and boss key in first half of tower)
6: Some room dimensions seem to not work. There were a few cases where it seemed that I should have been able to get an STJ, but it just didn't work despite bashing my head against it for almost an hour. I could be bad, but I doubt it would take me that long to get a single one considering how often I use the STJs in this run.
7: Perhaps the biggest restriction is that despite being able to get almost anywhere in the overworld immediately with this technique, most of the dungeons in the game are still closed until the prior dungeon is completed. The exceptions to this seem to follow a very classic assumption based check that we see in Ocarina of Time (specifically thinking to only needing shadow and spirit medallion for light arrows). The dungeons that are open all the time are Pink Castle (because it's the first one), Marine's Ship (normally the bridge to reach this section of the map is broken until completing the first 3 dungeons), and Shiori's Archive (there is a boulder blocking the usual route that only Gigi can break, but she takes her sweet time doing so until Nerissa is defeated).
With all this in mind, I can skip:
-A small key and the boss key in Pink Castle.
-2 small keys in Cemetery.
-Going around through the lower path to reach the desert (small skip)
-The left path in the first section of Desert Temple.
-Going to the disjointed sections of Desert Temple to open doors in the main branch (so she'll be standing on that button forever).
Completing Desert Temple (only need Gigi's Tail).
-The entirety of the mountains region and Crystal Cave (as a side effect, I can't get any weapon/item upgrades, making late-game bosses very difficult and many rooms are much harder without Jewel of Emotion from Crystal Cave).
-2 small keys in Marine's Ship.
-A small key in the Islands dungeon.
-Most of the Islands dungeon (can leave immediately after getting the Music Staff).
-Small keys and puzzles in Shiori's Archive.
-Torch puzzle at the start of Tower
-A small key and the boss key in Tower 1st half
-(I didn't do this one in the run because I didn't think of it until afterwards, but the Hakos Baelz boss fight can be skipped)
-Some small keys and a significant portion of the Tower 2nd half.
All splits have been inputted manually after the completion of the run (It's hard to play on keyboard and hit a split key while playing. Might tinker with learning to make an autosplitter, we'll see.)
As I mentioned at the start, I wasn't the first person to do a run and I think it would be cool to see some meta progression for this Zelda-like game.
You can find the game here: store.steampowered.com/app/4184020/An_Automatons_Journey
